There were only two candidates on the primary ballot on Tuesday, one of whom was Tommy Suozzi, the former Nassau County Supervisor who served in the House until he ran against Kathy Hochul for governor. He lost that primary, while an unknown Republican took his former House seat. That was George Santos, a lying fabulist who was expelled from he House in short order, criminally convicted and then had his sentence commuted by Trump after he expressed his undying devotion.

Suozzi, who is what he calls a pragmatic Democrat, won the primary. He’s a liberal, not a progressive. While I don’t agree with him about everything, I appreciate his refusal to succumb to the progressive ideology, standing his ground rather than going along. It’s probably the most important thing a politician can do, stand for something. It was rare before. It’s exceptionally rare now.

As the election season comes into focus, you will hear little about the Republicans running against a guy like Suozzi. You will hear a great deal about them running against the two and a half candidates endorsed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Claire Valdez and Darializa Chevalier, and to a lesser extent, Brad Landers. Landers is a fairly hard left progressive. Valdez and Chevalier are not. They are Democratic Socialists. They are proud to be Democratic Socialists. They are proud to be the new face of the Democratic Party, and the Republicans could not be more thrilled.

Of the three New York City congressional candidates endorsed by Zohran Mamdani in Tuesday’s primary, Darializa Avila Chevalier was the weakest.4

A sociology Ph.D. student and doctrinaire leftist who has never held elected office, she was running against Adriano Espaillat, head of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. He’d built an uptown political machine known as the “squadriano” in New York’s 13th District, which includes Washington Heights, Harlem and parts of the Bronx. Many of the area’s neighborhoods are reliably progressive but not known for their radicalism.

But her lack of qualifications, reminiscent of AOC, isn’t her worst feature.

Last week, in an interview with the New York Editorial Board, a group of veteran journalists who question local political and civic leaders, Avila Chevalier said she opposed all deportations, even those of violent criminals. A prison abolitionist, she either couldn’t or wouldn’t answer repeated questions about whether murderers should be incarcerated. Both she and Espaillat are Dominican, and on the morning of the election, she walked off a popular Spanish-language radio show after she was asked about old tweets, including some that seemed to disdain Dominican nationalism. (In other since-deleted tweets, Avila Chevalier cursed at Kamala Harris, called Joe Biden a “rapist,” and derided his support for Ukraine as “bullying Russia.”) Her name was notably absent from a get-out-the-vote message that Bernie Sanders posted for other progressives on Tuesday.

Notably, she not only believes that Israel is engaged in genocide, but that Israel has no right to exist and should be wiped off the face of the earth. She cheered Hamas. She cheered October 7th. And as Michelle Goldberg’s op-ed suggests, she represents the future of the young and passionate Democratic Party.

New York’s primary demonstrated the astonishing political power of the mayor and of the Democratic Socialists of America, the organization that he, Avila Chevalier and Valdez are all members of. It suggests that Democratic voters have been radicalized by the horrors of Donald Trump’s second presidency and infuriated by their leaders’ failure to contain him. And it’s a sign that after the savagery of the war on Gaza, support for Israel has become toxic among large parts of the party’s base. Avila Chevalier was an organizer of the anti-Israel protest encampments at Columbia, whereas the American Israel Public Affairs Committee poured money into a super PAC supporting Espaillat.

As Goldberg notes, the primary election of Valdez, Landers and Chevalier does not necessarily reflect the larger Democratic Party, nor the views outside the cocoon of Mamdani’s city.

The city, of course, is not particularly representative of the rest of the country. New York’s electorate is more progressive, and Mamdani, who has brought a joyful, dynamic energy to the city’s governance, has a unique clout. The same night that his slate dominated in New York, AIPAC’s preferred candidate, Adrian Boafo, won a congressional primary in Maryland.

What Goldberg fails to grasp, however, is that the primary nominations of these candidates hands the Republicans a gift on a silver platter to counter the widely held disapproval of Trump among everyone left of center as well as undecided and moderate conservatives. This is what the MAGA candidates will run against, socialists. SOCIALISTS!!! No matter how poorly Trump has done, how disgraceful, corrupt, venal, deceitful, narcissistic and decrepit he may be, he is not a commie, which is how he and most of the polity will perceive this foolish children.

And sadly, pathetically, the Republicans may well have a point here.

That means the 2026 midterms could end up being a giant national experiment that tests the populist left’s theory of victory. For years, it has argued that Democrats have failed because, in thrall to corporate interests, they let themselves become the party of the status quo. Unable or unwilling to galvanize voters with an economically progressive alternative to the right, they’ve offered only timid, business-friendly incrementalism. Usamah Andrabi, a spokesman for Justice Democrats, the organization that recruited Avila Chevalier to run for Congress, told me that too often, the Democratic Party “tries to stymie big and bold ideas” in favor of technocratic pragmatism. “I think what voters have really made clear, particularly this past year, is that they are desperate for bold, visionary leadership,” he said.

It’s telling that Goldberg characterized these Democratic Socialists as the “popular left.” Just as progressive despised liberals, even more so than conservatives, socialists despise progressives as the enemy of their radical plans. Their scheme are big and bold. They’re also naive and ignorant. Worse still, they may well be the ideas that enable MAGA and Trump to win back the moderate and undecided voters who actually elect people to office, and who would pick a miscreant like Trump over the “bold, visionary leadership” of people like Valdez, Chevalier and Landers. Donald Trump thanks Mamdani and the primary voters of New York City for making his retention of power possible after all he’s done.